Google has announced that its Picasa photo sharing service now explicitly supports the iPhone:

“After you go to Picasa on your iPhone and log in, you can quickly see all your albums that you’ve uploaded to Picasa Web. If you click on any of the albums, you can get a full view of your picture with comments from your friends. Or you can click on Slideshow, sit back and watch the pictures scroll. You can also search for photos in your album or through community photos. Finally, with one of my favorite features, you can view your friends’ albums through favorites.”

Google automatically recognizes iPhone/iTouch users and formats Picasa for the smaller screen.

Paramount Pictures’ Jackass movie franchise is moving to the Web, with what they are calling the first studio-backed film to premiere online:

On Dec. 19, the studio will make Jackass 2.5 available in connection with Blockbuster’s Movielink service. The hour-plus film has original material and previously unseen outtakes from the second Jackass movie in 2006. The new movie, made for less than $2 million, will stream for free but will have 15- or 30-second commercials before and after it plays.

At the same time, the studio’s fellow subsidiary of Viacom, MTV Networks, and the creators of the Jackass franchise are using the new film to attract traffic to jackassworld.com, now under construction.

The site is billed as an online community offering blogs, original video content and an archive of the 24 episodes of Jackass, which ran on MTV in 2000 and 2001, as well as its longer-running spinoff Wildboyz.

The move is a conservative one, since Jackass 2.5 is a low-budget film largely cobbled together from outtakes. But the release is another example of how Viacom is taking the lead in testing the ad-supported Internet video model.

Earlier in the day, we reported that popular tech analyst Robert Scoble was planning to leave podcasting startup PodTech.

Since then, Scoble has confirmed his decision on his blog:

My last day there will be January 14th. I am working on a number of PodTech initiatives, including the CES BlogHaus as well as a Blogger Bus Tour to CES from San Francisco to Las Vegas which is sponsored by Microsoft (more on the bus, as well as how you can get a seat, next week when I get back into the office).

So, what will happen on January 15th? I told the audience at LeWeb that things haven’t been wrapped up yet. I have two options I’m considering on the table and will announce what I’m doing on January 15th.

Scoble also explained his decision:

Why not stay at PodTech? PodTech went through a lot of managerial chaos earlier this year and I was trying to help PodTech get to profitability and help it get some focus, business wise. You’ve seen some of those moves already as PodTech has moved away from an editorial focus and toward an corporate media development one, which is where much of PodTech’s revenues (which are in the millions per year now) are coming from. That’s a decision I helped PodTech make and I think they are good ones and will help it avoid the TechCrunch Dead Pool. Companies need a lot of help creating media, so PodTech has a pretty good future opportunity ahead of it, which is why its investors continue to support it.

When did I make this decision? In the past week. I know that back in October I said I wasn’t going to leave PodTech, but a lot has changed in that two-month period. PodTech’s new management team has been working together a lot better, and the direction it’s been going is different than it was back in October.

Now that PodTech is getting some focus I found that my show needed a new home in order for it to get to the next level, too.

Scoble follows a string of others that have used their video podcasts as stepping stones to other opportunities.

Apple has updated the iTunes store with a directory of their top podcasts of 2007.

Lots of the usual suspects, including Sesame Street, NPR’s Fresh Air, Ask a Ninja, Grammar Gril Diggnation, Boing Boing TV & Tiki Bar TV. It’s a great starting point, though, for people new to podcasting.

Another demonstration of the fact that Apple has done more than any other major company to promote podcasting.

Movable Type’s Anil Dash today announced that the popular blogging platform is being GPL’d, as Movable Type Open Source. It’s now open source and free for any use.

The change makes sense for MT. WordPress was threatening to marginalize the Movable Type platform.¬† WordPress’s openness has been attracting the attention of developers and it’s become very popular for podcasting and other new media uses, as a result.

The move is also great for users. Movable Type is a mature platform that was limited by its licensing. Now both the Movable Type and WordPress communities will benefit from competition and collaboration between the two platforms.

More bad news for troubled podcasting startup PodTech: According to reports via TechCrunch and Twitter, popular tech analyst Robert Scoble is leaving the company and taking ScobleShow, the closest thing PodTech has had to a hit show, with him:

Famous blogger Robert Scoble will be leaving his current job at PodTech in mid January, he says. He will likely be joining Fast Company to start Fast Company TV.

Scoble was with PodTech for just a year and a half. He was previously at Microsoft and acted as their unofficial spokesperson.

Scoble isn’t saying if he’ll continue to use the same format as his current show, ScobleShow, where he interviews entrepreneurs daily. Another big question is whether his sponsor, Seagate, will follow him to Fast Company. It’s rumored Seagate is paying a massive fee to sponsor the show.

Earlier in the year, Scoble staunchly defended PodTech, saying “Reports of PodTech’s demise are bull####!” said Scoble. “This is total, 100% bull####. Not even deserving of a response. I’m not leaving PodTech. When, er if, I am you’ll read it here on my blog.”

No word of the announcement at Scoble’s blog yet.

We spend a lot of time looking at the big trends shaping Internet media at Podcasting News, and one of the most important ones is that people’s attention is moving to the Web faster than traditional media companies. As a result of this shift, mainstream broadcasters are losing their audience to things like YouTube and video podcasts.

There’s a real cost to this, and recent news from NBC highlights the fact that Internet video is starting to hit mainstream broadcasters in the pocketbook in a big way.

NBC is failing to deliver advertisers the audiences that they have been promised and is having to give them back their ad dollars as a result:

NBC has quietly begun reimbursing advertisers an average of $500,000 each for failing to reach guaranteed ratings levels, the first time a network has taken such a step in years, media buyers said.

Networks usually offer make-goods — free advertising slots — in the event of such shortfalls. But NBC has none to give. In fact, no broadcast network has much ad inventory left between now and year’s end — except for, perhaps, a handful of units the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and that doesn’t do much for advertisers chasing holiday shoppers.

CBS, ABC and Fox also are doling out make-goods, primarily for the first quarter. They have blamed softness on a new ratings formula, but media agencies disagree. None of the networks would comment.

NBC and others have been timid to explore the idea of free, ad-supported internet video, and have put preserving DVD revenues over building a the next-generation revenue platform. It’s already evident that this isn’t a viable long-term strategy.

NBC and other mainstream broadcasters need to move their attention to free Internet video, because their audience already has.

Anne Zelenka at GigaOm has an interesting take on the idea of using WordPress as a social networking platform, looking at DiSo, Chris Messina’s project to build a social networking platform based on WordPress:

“In contrast to social networking, blogging offers a person-centric way for individuals to come online. A social network like Facebook gives you your own place online, but it‚Äôs not really your own place. As Copyblogger Brian Clark recently said in a blog post, ‚ÄúFor me, there‚Äôs really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating ‚Äòuser-generated‚Äô content via a social networking application. That‚Äôs like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.‚Äù

Clark was responding to an ongoing conversation launched by blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who proposed that blogging is far more important to him than social networking. Bloggers including Stowe Boyd and Darren Rowse seconded the idea. This growing disenchantment with social networking and return to blogging suggests that in the future we could see a migration, at least among tech bloggers, towards more distributed social networking ‚Äî along the lines of what Messina envisions.”

In addition to Messina’s project, another WordPress social network project to watch is Andy Peatling’s BuddyPress. The goal for BuddyPress is to completely transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a fully functional social network platform.

The idea of opening up social networking so that anyone can build a social network makes sense. Web publishing has evolved from being something only big organizations could do to something that everyone can do. Audio and video publishing are doing the same thing, evolving into things that anyone can do. It looks like building social networks will follow this path, too.

Time has published their take on the Top 10 Gadgets of the Year, and the iPhone came out on top:

“The iPhone changed the way we think about how mobile media devices should look, feel and perform. The design is exceptional inside and out: It’s got a slick glass-and-stainless steel case and an elegant touch screen loaded with eye candy. It’s an iPod and a 2-megapixel camera. Images and video clips display vertically or horizontally ‚Äî they reorient themselves depending on how you hold the thing.

When the phone detects a wireless network within range ‚Äî your own home wi-fi set up or somebody else’s ‚Äî it lets you tap once to connect, and then proceed with your Web surfing, Google mapping, emailing and other activities that can otherwise be painfully slow over AT&T’s cellular network ‚Äî the only one, unfortunately, that carries iPhone calls.”

You could argue that the iPhone’s competition was a little weak this year. Other gadgets in the top ten include the Palm Centro, the Samsung P2, the FlyTech Dragonfly, the Iomega eGo Hard Drive & a Belkin WiFi Router. Notably absent from the list is the Amazon Kindle ebook reader, one of the more hyped gadgets of the year.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere today about the importance of Twitter.

David Armano, VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass, wonders “Why is Twitter exploding?”, and suggests that it’s rapidly growing because it has created a “conversation ecosystem”.

Forrester Analyst Jeremiah Owyang says that “conversations have shifted to Twitter,” and calls it a next-generation chat room.

If Alexa’s traffic statistics are any indication, though, Twitter isn’t exploding, it’s stagnating. Here’s an Alexa graph of Twitter.com’s reach for the last six months…..